WuXi ex machina

How WuXi NextCode is honing its AI tools through academic collaborations

By Winnie Pong, Staff Writer | Jun 1, 2017 | 8:34 PM GMT

Since its acquisition two years ago by New WuXi Life Science Ltd., WuXi NextCode Genomics Inc. has been busy building out its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and test driving them via its expanding network of academic and industry collaborators. The strategy is starting to pay off with both a publication and presentation in the last two months showcasing the platform’s diagnostic power and its ability to accelerate discovery of new mechanisms in cancer.

WuXi NextCode has already launched three genomics-based diagnostics companies in China, and last month raised a $75 million series B round, which will fund commercialization of the tests, as well as continued development of its deepCODE AI tool.

On May 3, the company published a study in Nature in partnership with a Yale University group using the AI platform to trace the role of FGF signaling in vascular development to effects on glycolysis, a cellular function the FGF pathway had only been tenuously linked to before.

And at April’s meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), WuXi NextCode showed deepCODE could classify 9,000 tumors into 27 of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) tumor subtypes with over 95%